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A year ago, I had this to say: The progressive left will never be able to achieve their dream of a Euro-style welfare state by taxing the rich. If you read the smarter progressives, they all know this. They understand that the US would have to add a large tax on consumption in order to .. MORE
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Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
Although Paris still gets fed, our economy is facing turbulence. There’s presumably more than one reason for this. One reason I want to highlight here is the failure of many economists to recognise the importance of systems thinking—and act accordingly. So, what do I mean by systems thinking? Essentially, it means analysing a complete system, .. MORE
Statistics and Statistical Analysis
I really enjoyed Scott Sumner’s recent post about how people are bad at understanding coincidences. There are many reasons why we can be bad at this, but one I want to talk about here is that we only selectively recognize certain coincidences, making them appear far more striking than they really are. Here’s an example .. MORE
Cross-country Comparisons
According to the IMF, America’s GDP per capita (in PPP terms) is 35.6% higher than in Canada. In a recent post, I pointed out that to the casual observer, Canadian living standards seem fairly close to those in the US, albeit slightly lower. In this post I’ll try to address the question of why the .. MORE
Monetary Policy
Lately, President Trump has been pressuring Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell to cut interest rates. This has set off concerns about Federal Reserve independence. And reasonably so. Generally speaking, the more independent the central bank is from political pressure, the better the country’s economy performs on monetary measures like inflation (interested readers can find a .. MORE
Cost-benefit Analysis
The second use is more resource-saving than the third. At my cottage in Canada, I have running water from a pump in the lake but not safe water. So in what we call the “bath hut” I have a bottle of clean water from which I pour a little into a Dixie cup when I .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
In my last post, I discussed reasons why rage bait is so depressingly successful. And I see a lot of discourse in favor of libertarianism that seems to lean into the rage bait angle. Sometimes it takes the form of “look at this outrageous and awful thing” done by the government or caused by government .. MORE
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Bloggers David Henderson, Alberto Mingardi, Scott Sumner, Pierre Lemieux, Kevin Corcoran, and guests write on topical economics of interest to them, illuminating subjects from politics and finance, to recent films and cultural observations, to history and literature.
Browse our archive of posts by author last nameAdam Smith
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith used rules about writing as a metaphor for rules of conduct. He examines conduct by two different measures. In one measure, he considers what rules one would need to follow to, in my inelegant paraphrase, avoid being an actively scummy person. On the other hand, he also considers .. MORE
Austrian Economics
I’ve been setting up my cottage in Canada and relaxing, which is why I haven’t posted this week. I’ll pick up the pace this coming week. The Young Rothbard: an Uncomfortable Neoclassical Economist by Joseph T. Salerno, Mises.org, July 3. 2025. Excerpts: Rothbard took courses with all these eminent economists but was especially influenced by .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
My winter read this year was Natsume Sōseki’s 1906 satirical novel I am a Cat (original title: Wagahai wa Neko de Aru). The novel is told from the perspective of an unnamed cat and contains vignettes of its observations of its master Mr Sneaze (Sōseki’s conception of himself), Mrs Sneaze (his wife), and several of .. MORE
The more research I have done on economic statistics, appreciating the practical challenges, the less certain I am that we know anything solid about today’s economy. –Diane Coyle, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters,1 (page 29) It would be nice to have definitive measures of economic progress. We would like to know whether .. MORE
IT GIVES me great satisfaction to see this book, handsomely printed by a distinguished publishing house, appear in its third revised edition. Two terminological remarks may be in order. First, I employ the term “liberal” in the sense attached to it everywhere in the nineteenth century and still today in the countries of continental Europe. .. MORE
Can the four-year degree be saved? Not for most learners, I would argue. Once less expensive alternative pathways become clearer and surer, a full-on degree will seem impractical… But why does the degree have to be the only product that colleges sell? And why can’t the American Dream be achieved by other college products, other .. MORE
Whether to have a child is what I call a wild problem—a fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn’t obvious, where the pleasure and pain from choosing one path over another are ultimately hidden from us, where the path we choose defines who we are and who .. MORE
Apropos welfare state: The US already spends more on social welfare per capita than eg France.
Matthias, July 17